Back in the lab, Topher gripes that Echo's backup singer/ninja imprint is probably not the right one: "I don't know why Alpha would imprint her as a background singer unless he was starting an evil band!" Hey, between the Buffy musical episode and Dr. Horrible, I wouldn't put it past Joss...er, "him." Boyd calls in from a car on the highway, or "even worse bluescreen than the last one we saw" if you prefer, and asks if Alpha had any engagements that ended up in Pedro, as he kept the woman we just saw "in some sort of defunct power plant." This rings a bell, and after reviewing the imprints for "Whiskey 1.1," Topher confirms that the place Alpha took Lars and the place he's holding Echo are one and the same. He gives up the address, but after he disconnects, he has another epiphany and checks the imprint -- and discovers it's the one Alpha used. He breathes, "Whiskey," and we pull back to see that she's standing just out of sight. I hope she didn't just pull a Candyman here, because I'm not at all ready to lose Topher.

Alpha orders Echo back into the chair, saying he's going to put Caroline back in her and then kill her. Echo points out that he could just shoot her and the wedge, but he says he's going to keep the personality, and put it into many different women just so he can kill her as many times as he feels like it, until he gets bored. Having met Caroline, I can guess that that will take a while. On the other hand, it's not like he's giving Echo much incentive to toe the line here. Regardless, Echo sits in the chair and recalls that he likes knives, scissors, and cutting things. "Whiskey. You cut up that poor girl because of me!" Alpha tells her he did it for her, but Echo's had just about enough, snapping for him to save it as he hilariously puts the gun back to the wedge in a "Don't make me!" gesture. Hee. She snarls that cutting up women hardly makes him an ascended being, and hops out of the chair, daring him to destroy the wedge, which sends him into a multiple-personality feedback loop for a moment until he breaks out of it and shoots Echo in the shoulder. That barely slows her down, though...

...and she chases him outside and up some exterior stairs as Boyd and Ballard arrive on the scene, and I know she's in shape but you'd think a gunshot wound might hinder her a little. We stay on Ballard and Boyd for like, a whole minute without anything happening, which is especially a shame because there's a whole bit in here with November and Sierra that got cut, and it not only read on the page as one of the more exciting parts of the episode, it gave Ballard a little better reason to choose November at the end, and I refrained from pointing out the numerous other examples of this, but whoever made the final editing choices here was completely out to lunch in my opinion. Anyway, Caroline continues to give Alpha chase, so he finally holds the wedge out as bait and tosses it far away, and Echo goes after it instead. She finds it precariously balanced on a metal beam, climbs out, and crawls over to get it - but when she reaches out, the bullet she took FINALLY causes her arm to spasm, and she knocks the wedge off the beam. It falls -- but Ballard is there to catch it, and that moment gets the ultimate rating: TALEGGIO! Seriously, Ballard "saving the girl" like this is incredibly lame. Of course, it would have made up for it if Echo fell and Ballard had to catch her as well, but considering the show's fighting to come back, I can see where they wouldn't have wanted to shell out for the stunt.